Saturday, February 22, 2014

Gouge Their Calm Eyes Out

Buying tickets in order to sell them for above face value goes against everything I stand for.

But letting Yankee fans get tickets to a not-even-definite "Jeter's last game" at face value when they're dumb enough to pay five times that trumps everything.

So we here at RSFPT are endorsing the use of price-gouging on Yankee fans. Buy your tickets and then use them to steal their money. Bonus: when Jeter's long since gone home for the winter and they're stuck with tickets to a meaningless game, they'll be selling them for under face value--you buy them back, enjoy the last regular season home game, and use the profit you made to buy playoff tickets.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Son Of A Gee

The only reason I don't write more about Nirvana on this blog is because there would just be so damn much to write about. So instead I just throw out bits and pieces periodically. With today being Two2014, and with Hall of Fame talk and 20th-anniversary-of-death talk floating around, I am in another N-phase, this time revisiting Incesticide.

The 'cest was always my favorite. A year after the band broke big, they released this EP that for whatever reason wasn't promoted much. It was like having my own private little* Nirvana "album" to get me through that winter of my last year of high school and my first job. Even within my own school, the band never got that popular. I'm sure a lot of schools were suddenly draped in flannel the day after Smells Like Teen Spirit came out, but ours was so straight-laced and stiff, the few of us who got into the band actually remained a pretty exclusive club. It was pretty much me and Pat and Trevor and the couple of stoner kids who knew the band from the Bleach days. It would still be a few more years before the eleven-year olds of my town were dying their hair and skateboarding. Almost like a culture-shift hand grenade. It was a glorious time in the relatively brief moment that grenade was still hanging in the air.

I'm not gonna do a complete review of Incesticide--my point is that it was special to me because it showed the many sides of the band. The kids who didn't buy this record were left with that one image of Nirvana from Nevermind, while the rest of us got to see that this band was into some weirder shit and had a sense of humor too. You could finally tell exactly what they meant in that famous bio:

All in all we sound like The Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.

We got a lot of the Bleach-era sludge, and we got short, poppy numbers too. The genius of Kurt Cobain is right here: Taking a song by the Vaselines that sounds like a cross between utopian children's music and a tune you'd hear on a Time-Life 60s British Invasion comp, and turning it into a rollicking blink-and-you-missed-it punk romp. [Vaselines version.] [Nirvana version.]

I also like the fact that they changed the first line of a cover song.

Since this record meant so much to me at the time, it was always really hard for me to listen to after Kurt died. At that time I threw all my legit Nirvana releases into a box and focused on bootlegs and newer releases. These last few days is actually the most I've listened to my favorite Nirvana release in 20 years. If you never bought it, it's not too late to join the secret club.

*Yes, it sold 4 million copies, but by comparison Nevermind sold 31 million.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

News From The 4t

In case you're out of NESN-land, this year's wacky contest is having players shoot a hockey puck at a net from about ten feet away. They seem to be treating it more like shuffleboard as these guys aren't hockey players.

Over/under is 3 days on the first journalist to complain about how boring spring training is while the rest of us wish we could make a living following a baseball team around and getting a month-long Florida va-goddamn-cation every year.

I saw where Shaughnessey wrote an article "warning" about the "World Series hangover" citing bad Red Sox performances in 1968, 1976, and 1987. Man, we should just concede 2014 right now.

Meanwhile, Cafardo wrote an article saying that we should "face it": Derek Jeter is the Yankee you can't hate. 35,000 boos rain down on him every time he bats, but the apparent truth is that every single one of those comes from a person who loves Jeter. Fortunately you needed a subscription to read beyond the first line of that article. The Boston media keeps proving they truly think the players they like are the ones we like, and the ones they hate are the ones we hate. Manny Ramirez was cheered constantly, a fan favorite. The media hated him because he didn't "give them what they wanted," so they acted like he was a reviled figure. Meanwhile Jeter is booed every time but because he's good at...media-ing, they tell us how much we love him as we're booing him.

Then on NESN tonight, Cafardo talked about how Jeter isn't the type of guy to want to have all the attention on him, in the wake of Jeter deciding to have all the attention put on him all year long. The guy can do no wrong. I'm telling you, the day it's revealed he took PEDs, we're suddenly gonna hear about the "right way" to take PEDs.

Even Francesa seems to be realizing that Jeter just isn't that great. And I think it's because he gets to field the "do you think Bin Laden would be alive today if it weren't for Derek Jeter?" calls all day. He's even been forced to say things like "Jeter doesn't compare to Frank Robinson and Mike Schmidt and Willie Mays," because everybody's calling him the greatest to ever live and stuff. It took an "all about me"-style retirement to turn Mike Francesa into the voice of reason about Derek Jeter. Who would have thought....

Monday, February 17, 2014

My Blood Pressure Is "Rising" Reliving This Stuff

I've been reading Michael Gee's coverage of 1986 baseball postseason in old issues of the weekly Boston Phoenix online. Some highlights are below. Click each to read more easily.

The 10/21/86 issue was between ALCS and World Series. The Red Sox had just completed their amazing from-the-dead comeback, and Gee closes his article with this:

Wow. He talks about how after that ALCS, we'd never have to hear about the "destiny-of-doom jive" again, and that "you've got to like the Red Sox' chances forever." Little did he know.... (He does talk about how logic has gone out the window and that all scenarios in the World Series are equally plausible.)

We move to the 10/28 issue, at which point the first five games of the World Series have been played. We all remember the Sox taking two at Shea before losing the next two at home and then going up 3-2 as the series headed back to Queens. And Mr. Gee is a tad off again:

He says the 1986 World Series will be remembered as being "noticeably short of the melodrama of the preceding playoffs." Whoops. He should have re-read his own words from the previous week, with the logic and the plausibility and whatnot. [Side note: I believe there is a line covered up at the bottom of the above article. I think it says: "But it probably won't." Odd that he'd think the title of World Champions wouldn't satisfy either set of fans. I'm pretty sure Mets fans were kinda okay with winning that year.]

And now it's all over. November is here, and Gee is still writing. [Had to cut this into two parts.] Here's what he closes with:

Lots of "curse" talk there. I do like how he mentions "some far distant edition of the Red Sox" who will finally win it all.

Another interesting thing from the November 4th issue: They have an article by a person who's involved with a rabid fan of the Boston teams. She tries as hard as she can but just can't get into it. She decides the whole thing just isn't worth it. Oddly, though, she ends her piece talking about how it's currently Game 7 of the ALCS. I think it's kind of fitting that after she goes through close calls with the Celts and Pats, possibly the all-time heart-breaking-est ending to a baseball season happens, but she's decided to hand her article in without even seeing how the World Series turned out first. That's all we needed to know about whether she was a true fan or not. At least she was honest. Still, I wonder if the Phoenix had second thoughts about printing what turned out to be a seemingly woefully unfinished tale that week.

There's also an article written by a Mets fan from one of the October issues, talking about how all the frontrunners in Manhattan have picked up on Mets Mania but will drop them just as quickly when things go sour again, and how the tickets for the playoffs all end up in the hands of the bosses of the true fans who went to games all season.

So go find this stuff at the Google archives and read it all. Of course, when I saw they had old Phoenixes (Phoenices?) up there, I dove in not looking for sports stuff, but for old ads for concerts and music reviews and stuff. It's so funny reading these Sox stories right next to ads for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark at the Centrum in Worcester or whatever. And look, they didn't even know how to spell "Megadeth" yet!

P.S.: For anyone who doesn't know me or how old I am, I will point out that I remember this series like it was five minutes ago and it still kills me. I was 11 years old but had been following the Red Sox for years (despite what the Internet tells you: "We all started liking baseball at age 8 or 9, you don't have interest in it before that." Terrible job, Internet. I was collecting cards in '78!). Aunt Nancy came over just so she could be with us when the Red Sox won the World Series. We all stood up in a circle in the family room and held hands waiting for that final strike....

Sunday, February 16, 2014

How Did Nobody Win This Jackpot?

Powerball was up over 300 million last night, and nobody won. I looked at the numbers, and was surprised to see that the highest one was 23! Granted, quick-picks probably make up a vast majority of tickets, but of the people who choose their own numbers, the most common numbers chosen are important dates. Meaning if there's a number over 31 (it goes up to 59), date people don't win the jackpot. Uniform numbers are big too, and in baseball, low numbers are more common, and star players commonly have really low ones. So last night, you had 2, 9, 14, 21, 23, with a Powerball of 3. Right off the top of my head, that's Remy, Ted, Rice, Clemens*, Oil Can, with a Pokey Powerball, or Jeter, Maris, Piniella, O'Neill, Mattingly, and a Babe Ruth Powerball. But forget about that, you'd think somebody has family members with those birthdays. There are three sub-13 numbers in there for month numbers. If you have three kids who were born on 2/14, 9/21, and 3/23, you had a legit shot of leaving them 100 million dollars each so that they can all get out of their respective texting-while-driving-manslaughter lawsuits that happened because you were too busy playing Powerball to teach them not to be selfish assholes.

You also had 2 and 14 in there on the drawing closest to Valentine's Day. And I see that there were only 8 people who matched the first five numbers. I think if everybody was forced to pick their own numbers, multiple people would have shared the jackpot.

So it goes up over 400 million for Wednesday. Now all the date people are probably pissed that six sub-32 numbers popped and therefore (not really) that isn't likely to happen again in the next drawing.

Dempster Gives Up 13 Mil To Sit Out

Ryan Dempster won't be pitching in 2014. He's saying something about family and health. While this is pretty odd, and might mean we use his money to sign Drew (why didn't he tell us before Bronson signed elsewhere?!), I have to say that it's refreshing any time an athlete decides to not accept money that was theirs to have. People say "it's always about money," but there are instances where human beings will deem money less important than something else.